Ellison Blasts New HP CEO in Tangled Web over SAP Lawsuit

News Analysis: Larry Ellison contends that the incoming HP CEO was SAP's CEO when Oracle software was stolen and should testify under oath, which could lead to major complications for HP.

On the eve of the final skirmish in the legal war Oracle has been waging
since 2007 with Germany-based databaser SAP,
CEO Larry Ellison has been making some
enterprise-size waves-and not just at his legal opponent.

Starting Monday at a courthouse in Oakland, Calif.,
Oracle and SAP will go before a judge and
jury, who will decide how much SAP will be
fined for one of its wholly-owned affiliates admittedly pilfering a lot of Oracle's
enterprise support software and then essentially using it against Oracle for
its own profit.

The amount of the fine could range from the tens of millions-which is what SAP
thinks is appropriate-to $2.15 billion, which is an amount of damages Oracle
says it suffered and SAP does not think
appropriate.

Oracle based the $2.15 billion on its estimation of the
value of the property SAP admitted stealing.

In March 2007, Oracle sued Texas-based SAP
subsidiary TomorrowNow-which has been closed down-for stealing intellectual
property by gaining unauthorized access to a customer-support Website and
copying thousands of pages of software documentation and support software.

Oracle claimed that more than 8 million instances of its enterprise support
software were stolen, stored on SAP's
servers and used without its permission. It also charged that SAP/TomorrowNow
deployed automated bots to carry out the bad deeds to help move customers from
PeopleSoft (owned by Oracle) over to SAP.

Enterprise support software amounts
to about half of Oracle's revenue, so this was no minor infraction.

SAP has acknowledged the illegal downloads
took place but said the information never left TomorrowNow and that SAP
never saw them. Oracle finds that very hard to believe.

There's more: Ellison also contends that the incoming CEO
of Hewlett-Packard, Leo Apotheker, who was co-CEO
of SAP when all this IP piracy was
happening, knew all about the questionable goings-on, yet did nothing to
prevent it for seven months.

Ellison contends that Apotheker was in effect the CEO
at the time of the thefts and should testify under oath in this case,
which would disrupt his first few weeks on the job at HP and could possibly expose
him as a participant in the thievery, thus discrediting HP and its board for hiring him.

HP CEO out of the picture
for now

eWEEK was told by a source familiar with the situation that Apotheker is out of the country touring HP locations, and thus cannot
be subpoenaed to appear until he returns, although HP would not confirm or deny that to eWEEK. HP does not want him to have to
testify for a number of reasons, its main one being that Apotheker doesn't need
the distraction going into a huge new job. Fair enough.

SAP, a longtime partner of HP's, has said
that TomorrowNow was essentially out of Apotheker's purview and that Apotheker
wasn't CEO at the time of the misdeeds. SAP
also charged Oct. 27 that Ellison is using the trial as part of his personal
crusade against HP.

Chris Preimesberger was named Editor-in-Chief of Features & Analysis at eWEEK in November 2011. Previously he served eWEEK as Senior Writer, covering a range of IT sectors that include data center systems, cloud computing, storage, virtualization, green IT, e-discovery and IT governance. His blog, Storage Station, is considered a go-to information source. Chris won a national Folio Award for magazine writing in November 2011 for a cover story on Salesforce.com and CEO-founder Marc Benioff, and he has served as a judge for the SIIA Codie Awards since 2005. In previous IT journalism, Chris was a founding editor of both IT Manager's Journal and DevX.com and was managing editor of Software Development magazine. His diverse resume also includes: sportswriter for the Los Angeles Daily News, covering NCAA and NBA basketball, television critic for the Palo Alto Times Tribune, and Sports Information Director at Stanford University. He has served as a correspondent for The Associated Press, covering Stanford and NCAA tournament basketball, since 1983. He has covered a number of major events, including the 1984 Democratic National Convention, a Presidential press conference at the White House in 1993, the Emmy Awards (three times), two Rose Bowls, the Fiesta Bowl, several NCAA men's and women's basketball tournaments, a Formula One Grand Prix auto race, a heavyweight boxing championship bout (Ali vs. Spinks, 1978), and the 1985 Super Bowl. A 1975 graduate of Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., Chris has won more than a dozen regional and national awards for his work. He and his wife, Rebecca, have four children and reside in Redwood City, Calif.Follow on Twitter: editingwhiz